USAID doing COIN in Thailand in the late 70s?

[Mike in Hilo]

1) Thanks very much for the tip on the book. Incidentally, Zimmerman's a good guy--was one of our instructors 1970 when I was a trainee at the CORDS VN Training Center--lots of experience with the Montagnards, as I recall--wealth of knowledge.
2) Re: Institutional Coordination, etc.: Much that has recently been written about CORDS by those who weren't there seems to exaggerate the purview of CORDS over other institutions. But I do not believe the actual situation, in which CORDS encompassed fewer players, reflected a failing. By 1970-71, I believe MACCORDS itself saw that its role needed to be more focused. The organization realized that its focus ought to be on those activities that directly drove a wedge between the population and the insurgents and supported security. It was quite all right for USAID to do economic development--one more headache MACV did not need. (I might add that critical COIN player CIA was, for operational reasons, never a part of CORDS--an arrangement of obvious appropriateness.) So, CORDS focused mainly on (a) assisting in organizing Vietnamese villagers to commit themselves to their own self-defense (RF/PF and PSDF); (b)vigorously prodding the GVN to root out the VC infrastructure (this would encompass spreading the national police presence and certain RD Cadre activities as well as Phoenix); (c) in areas where war had resulted in large population displacements, ensuring that the GVN did not neglect the relocated/displaced civilians; and (d) a wide array of political and other reporting on what was going on in the countryside. CORDS also encouraged all the organs of government in the provinces simply to do their job (which they were basically well capable of doing, since they were engaged in this since the early 1950's). And, because of an institutional relationship with a GVN counterpart organization, it supported a variety of village community development activities. The last item was, in my view, not a critical one (and, in my view, off-focus) because it proved, in the event, irrelevant to affecting whatever hold the VC had on the population--often the VC would also benefit from the income generating projects. And in a period of full employment and economic boom resulting from the huge US military spending in-country, the economic impact of such small projects was de minimis, even at the hamlet level. I intended the unfortunate instance of IR rice feeding the enemy as an example that economic development and COIN can diverge. But I have no reason to believe that if USAID/Ag were squarely under CORDS, they would not have pushed IR rice anyway. Security improved dramatically in Nhon Trach by 1971, and with it, the VC ability to command such mass obedience was degraded considerably. But lack of real commodity/food control remained an overall failing. We never did use leverage, while we still had it, to break the GVN's political accommodation with the enemy that allowed the Shadow Supply System to flourish.

Cheers,
Mike.